


you cannot push me into this hole (it is not my grave)

by cloudling



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 20:04:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7188149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudling/pseuds/cloudling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is fate to a king? What is fate to an irreverent teenager with a magic robotic bee and Gansey’s unwavering attention? Henry Cheng put Gansey in a toga made out of a sheet Cheng2 once threw up on and taught him how to feel.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	you cannot push me into this hole (it is not my grave)

Henry Cheng is a Chinese-Korean Canadian boy, and little ugly towns in middle Virginia are not his home. Henrietta might be a pulse-point, a magic dusty fount of age-old skeletons and secrets and whatnot, but the blood in Henry’s veins has been person after person before Glendower’s magically-preserved feet ever hit the ground. So sorry if he’s not dead in the ground impressed (ha!) with Richard Gansey’s fake dead king.

Gansey loves Henrietta. He thinks he was _made_ by Henrietta, the quest, the heroic blood and sweat shed by his perfect gold head.

Henry’s not white, so he really doesn’t think so.

 

* * *

 

Gansey’s car was Henry’s favorite thing about him, before Gansey knew about magic and Henry Cheng. It was absolutely ugly, a horrific wreck of manufacturing bygones that ran half on prayer, and Gansey wasn’t religious. Gansey was effortless and genuine a thousand other positive, kingly attributes that the world heaped on him deservedly every single day of his silver-spoon life, but this car was undeniably a disaster. It was ugly. Gansey, and Henry, loved it, and Henry loved Gansey.

Ronan made Gansey an exact replica of this ugly car that ran on nothing. Henry, who knew magic laid in his bones, thought this was perfectly natural. It felt real. It was magic. Gansey’s joy radiated out of every single one of his pores, the perfect lift of his grin and the lines of his back.

Henry basked in it, like a large cat.

They got into the car, Gansey and Henry and Blue, and rode off into the metaphorical sunset.

Henry nonsensically wonders if they’re ever going to make it to Vancouver. He doesn’t particularly want to return there, though it formed a foundation of his identity while at Aglionby. The Vancouver kids. He’s not a Henrietta kid, not by a long shot or any shot, but Vancouver isn’t where he’s from either.

He catches Blue and Gansey kissing on the second night, sitting on the floor by the door, their faces bathed in the soft blue glow of Gansey’s phone screen. His heart gives a sharp kick. It’s happened so many times he doesn’t even know how to feel, the pull of Richard Campbell Gansey the Third. Sometimes it feels like a phantom limb, one that pulls him closer. Sometimes it feels like an angry little buzz along the back of his neck.

White boys. Henry wants to stop. No, he doesn’t. He wants to hurtle headlong towards Gansey’s perfectly shaped all-American mouth.

Gansey and Blue are in love. They’re each other’s true loves, red string, fate, star-crossed, teenage nirvana and Justin Bieber before the bucket spitting and racist graffiti. This fact feels bolded, italicized, written in twenty-foot neons. Gansey _died_ because he was Blue’s true love.

It says something about Henry Cheng that this bothers him none. What is fate to a king? What is fate to an irreverent teenager with a magic robotic bee and Gansey’s unwavering attention? Henry Cheng put Gansey in a toga made out of a sheet Cheng2 once threw up on and taught him how to feel.

 

* * *

 

After all that dying in the magic forest, their first stop is predictably and suitably the ocean. It is a long grey smear when they drive up to it as the last light of the day melts away.

Henry has never eaten a hotdog before. Blue is enraged. “You’ve never eaten a _hotdog_?”

Henry (and Gansey, by the way he’s very studiously poking roasting spikes through the things) knows she thinks it’s a rich person thing. Henry and Gansey, rich boys with private chefs that follow them around. No time or stomach for hotdogs, bought at the convenience store for $2.78 for ten.

Privately, Henry thinks about spicy rice cakes in orange sauce and bowls of clean white rice and tiny plates of shrimp dumplings and chestnut cakes and saucepans of ramen eaten at 3 a.m. “Nope,” he says sunnily, burying his toes in the sand.

“This is phallic,” he says later, gazing upon the wieners roasted to a gentle brown glaze.

Gansey winks and takes an enormous bite out of his, ketchup ringing his mouth.

God, looking at him for too long hurts Henry’s stomach. He wants to press a hand against the beautiful tapering V of his torso and put cheek against cheek, heart against heart.

Blue laughs, wiping the ketchup off with a finger, and rolls her eyes for good measure. “Boys.”

Henry feels lit up by the spark of Gansey in his gut.

They hike Shenandoah, all ablaze in ragged sunshine, clouds of gnats rising in shifting clouds above the dense clover. There’s nothing magic about it. It’s nice to take a break and feel something that isn’t a clod of magic in the stomach but real sweat from real work in the real world.

At the top of the ridge is a massive basin. “This used to be the Iapetus Ocean,” Gansey says, putting a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun.

Blue has drifted towards the edge, eyes fixed on the roiling waves of a million years past.

Henry joins her, threading his arm around hers. He can imagine a perfect somersaulting dive off the edge into all that water. A ghost of an ocean.

“C’mon,” Henry says finally, tugging Blue backwards. Her eyes are hard. She puts her other hand in Gansey’s and they lean their shoulders together, all three of them, and look at the stone-worn proof that even the ocean has an end.

At the bottom, Blue takes a chance in the porta-potty while Gansey and Henry look at the gift shop. Gansey buys a sticker that has a pretentious John Muir quote about wilderness and mountains and calling on it and puts it on the rear window.

“The mountains are calling and I must go-o-oooooo-oo,” Henry sing-songs, putting a hand to his forehead and pretending to faint onto the gravel. Really. It is just too ironic, seeing as these people literally had a murderous, Latin-speaking forest with talking trees telling them to do things and being in their brains. For all he knows, maybe the Blue Ridge Mountain really will have another dead old white guy under it. Maybe this one speaks Dutch.

“Are you just taking quests from different ecosystems now?”

“No,” Gansey says, frowning.

When Blue comes back from the bathroom, she takes a Sharpie to vinyl and crosses out ‘mountains’ and replaces it with ‘forests’. “Forests only,” she tells Henry seriously. “This is a specialized task force.”

That strikes some kind of chord with Gansey, and they realize that national parks are in fact, national, and have employees and volunteer systems. Now they pull up weeds and collect trash with the over-60 set.

Some of them want to know where Henry is “from”. “Money,” Henry says, smiling with all of his teeth so his eyes crinkle up into little sliver moons.

People don’t really like this response. Henry doesn’t like _these people_ , really. “We invented paper you know,” he says to an old man one day, throwing a rock down the side of the trail with no effort at all. “It was really easy.” Gansey doesn’t even have to look to know the uncomfortable expression on his wrinkly face. Gansey and Henry write enormous checks made out to the preservation of little crawly insects/small green frogs/dirt. Life goes on.

Somewhere between Shenandoah and Moab, they find a deep cave. Gansey squares his shoulders, and they descend into that liquid dark, the light on his helmet a beacon in front of him. If Henry were a poet, he’d write a thousand sonnets and a million haikus (smaller, and more space efficient) about the cosmic rightness of this moment. Gansey, chasing away the dark. Gansey the light, throwing himself bodily forward. There’s an awful pool of putrid water at the bottom amid columns of solidified bat poop.

“This is batshit!” Henry says, just to say it. It is a rather unconventional cave to plumb. Ha, plumbing.

This far down, they can hear the bats too, chittering and fluttering on the cave ceiling. Gansey turns off the light and they drown in darkness so wet and absolute that the hole in Aglionby, so long ago, so distant in memory, engulfs him.

The water drips. The bats squeak and shriek and fly, little claws glancing off the rock walls. They smell the poop, and it smells awful. Gansey, putting one reverent foot in front of another, wading through the water towards him.

All Henry can feel is the point of contact of Gansey’s fingers on his waist under the dark.

He can hear Blue sloshing onto a rock, the pinging of her watch hitting wall.

His nose is touching Gansey’s neck. And then his mouth is touching Gansey’s mouth.

Gansey loses his footing and slides backwards with an exaggerated splash into the rotten water.

 

* * *

 

“This isn’t Venezuela,” Blue says, some time later. She sounds put-off about it, her tone pulled tight. Henry’s not a mind-reader, but you don’t need to be one to know that this isn’t what she wants.

Blue wants Henry to be inert, unfeeling. Wants Henry to stop tugging Gansey’s small craft away from Blue’s hurricane. And blow she does, railing against _the man_ , the ragged tassels of all of her clothing whipping and lashing. She’s beautiful.

And also something else. And he sees Gansey put his foot right into that hole by accident, sees him wiggle it around, understand its shape and depth and dimension. Henry sees him look down at it, and then look up, and climb right out of that hole in a hole.

“I wish you would understand that I’m with you, Blue,” Henry hears Gansey say quietly, one day, a thread of frustration winding its way through voice. Blue doesn’t say anything in return. Henry doesn’t need to see or hear to know that they’re leaned up against each other.

Blue comes out with it one day. “I’m a lesbian,” she shouts, jettisoning a sheaf of gravel over the canyon wall. Henry high-fives her, and she smiles at him, her first real one in a while.

“Sorry, Gansey-boy,” she says to him, and he gives a little twist of his mouth, and she pecks him on the cheek.

“I knew,” he says, there it is, the golden light that rolls off him in waves. Henry’s not even exaggerating. When they roll up to the fabled American fields of wheat, Gansey blends right into the waving stalks set ablaze in the dry sunset.

Blue and Henry hold hands, because that’s what they do, watching Gansey’s sleep-tousled hair and the seat-seam imprint on his cheek get smaller in the distance.

“You good?” Henry asks her, eyes fixed on the sun.

“Yeah,” Blue says cheerfully.

He turns to look at her, waiting for the rest.

“That’s all, Cheng.” He fakes surprise, clutching at his chest, and Blue tries to put him in a headlock despite being a foot shorter than him (conservatively estimated). When Gansey gets back, there’s a dirt boot-print on Henry’s linen shorts and Blue’s shirt looks the same. That is to say, grunge, or other clothing trends that make you look like you hate puppies in the sunshine.

Henry understands, intuitively, that Blue is leaving. He tells Gansey, and Gansey stops shredding grass for a minute to look Henry in the eyes. Henry forces himself to breath. Being looked at by Gansey like this feels like undergoing the world’s most invasive strip-search, a lifelong sentence to constant examination by the TSA, and a bit like ascending to sainthood.

He must see something in Henry’s eyes, something even Henry’s not sure of. He straightens, and nods once, like a general going to war. He brushes the grass bits off his trousers, worn even in the dead heat of the sun-baked month of July, and goes to find Blue, hands shoved casually into his pockets. Henry watches those hips, the dynamic line of his shoulders to waist and the two careful inches of exposed ankle. He’s got it so bad it makes him sick, the lurch of his stomach when he remembers Gansey’s lips against his in the dark.

Some part of him is on fire. On fire from the thought of it. From the experience of it. Pick me. He hates himself for it, but he loves himself always. _Pick me_. Henry Cheng is the sweet singe of ginger, deep blue lagoons, and he knows it. Knows the harsh black scrawl of his eyebrows on his forehead and the peak of his nose, unmistakably Chinese in the presence of it, jutting out from the flat planes of his face.

Pick me. Pick his slanted narrow eyes, views from up high and down low and in between. Don’t pick the ugly backroads of Henrietta and the trap of normalcy waiting in the foothills, pick Henry, pick the magic laid in his veins and bones and blood.

Pick

Me

Gansey comes back.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. the hole in a hole line inspired directly by anne boyer's poem, 'what resembles the grave but isn't', title taken from it too  
> 2\. i realize there are prob not caves like that in the continental US but yolo cars can't drive on water yet  
> 3\. gratuitous imagery/diaspora feelz nation


End file.
